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About the Author

Donald K. Rosenberg is president of Stromian Technologies, an international
consultancy for software marketing, distribution, and licensing. He is the publisher
of the OEM Software Licensing Guide, the Open Source Software Licensing Page,
and other on-line marketing resources at www.stromian.com.
Dr. Rosenberg has 20 years of marketing experience and has worked with companies
large and small in the U.S. and Europe, both in Open Source and in more traditional
software markets and channels. A speaker on Open Source licensing issues at
USENIX, ALS, Linux Expo, and Comdex, he is on the Advisory Boards of the Linux
Mall and other Open Source companies.

[Dedication page]

For Karla Anne, quae diutius libello proprio carebat

Foreword

Even Being a Forward Kind of Guy......

I am still flattered when asked to write a forward to a person's book...particularly
when that person is Donald Rosenberg.

I met Don at the first Freenix track that was given by USENIX in January of
1997. Don was easy to spot, since he was the one person out of 500 that was
wearing a suit, and was second in age only to me.

"What are you speaking on,'' I asked, seeing his speaker's ribbon. "I am here
to talk about licensing," Don answered, with a shy smile and the twinkle in
his eye that he often shows. "Thank Heaven that someone is doing it,'' I remember
thinking at the time.

Linux licensing seems to be the most confusing thing about Linux, and it should
be a very easy thing to understand. Free software! How can it get any simpler
than that? Yet people kept having issues with understanding the General Public
License (GPL) and other licenses associated with what most people call "Free
Software" and/or "Open Source.''

I have heard many questions over the years. When do I have to ship the sources
to my product, and when can I keep the sources to myself if I want to do so?
What benefits do my customer and I have from making my source code available?
What parts of a Linux distribution are "free,"' and what do I have to pay for
on a system by system basis? Can I really copy a whole CD-ROM of software and
sell it for money as long as I acknowledge the people who worked on it? Why
do Linux people keep saying there are two meanings of "free" (freedom and
"no cost") and that they do not always just talk about "freedom," particularly
when the conversation turns to beer.

There are a variety of licenses that have similar meanings, even if
the results of applying them are vastly different over time. For example, the
Berkeley Software Distribution was one of the most popular versions of Unix,
but its license (which did not require changes to the OS to be freely distributed)
allowed to other versions of Unix systems based on BSD to diverge in functionality.
This allowed the commercial Unix systems to diverge, creating an insurmountable
obstacle for independent software vendors (ISVs).

There also exists the whole concept of making money on something that is free
of cost, or the perception that people are charging money on something they
are supposedly giving away. One can begin to understand why there is confusion
in the common marketplace, a marketplace that has existed for years on protecting
and selling intellectual property.

But we are going into a new marketplace, a marketplace created by the Internet,
which is so big and so diverse that you can find a large enough market to think
a different way. The entire computer marketplace at the start of the New Millenium
is about 400 million units. Imagine what the marketplace will be like (and the
amount of money that will be made using traditional means of selling software)
as the market expands to embrace the emerging nations, a marketplace of an additional
5.6 Billion people?

This market may be of people who wish to modify an already existing (and free)
operating system platform and who might pay a person good money to tailor it
to their needs. You might also find a large enough group of people willing to
donate their time and energies to create the basis of this platform and give
it away for free. Then have these two groups of people come together to help
support each other, all the time building on that which has been built before.

This new market may reject the concept of paying (and repaying) for software
developed two, three or four years ago, which is what we do today.

For a long while, I could not explain why people created good software, then
gave away both the binaries and the source code to it. Then it hit me. It was
the same as an amateur painter.

Very few amateur painters put their paintings in a dark closet. They then typically
hang it on the wall. Sometimes they take it to an art show to have it judged
by people they feel are better then themselves in various techniques. They might
be told how to mix their colors better, or how to use certain artist's tools
and tricks to make their pictures better. Finally they apply these techniques
to create even better paintings, but they do want their paintings seen and admired.
This is why they hang them on the wall.

The equivalent for software of "hanging on the wall" is to be distributed and
used by people all over the world.

And if you can do it with an operating system, could you also do it with other
things too? Perhaps you could find musicians who played music because they wanted
to create art. Old songs would be distributed for free, and could be modified
to create new songs without royalty to the original artist as long as the modifications
were also distributed for free. Perhaps in the larger audience of the Internet
there would be enough people willing to pay for modifying the old songs (or
having new ones written) that artists would be paid for creation of new works
rather than just living off the royalties of old works.

But I digress. In this book we are talking about software, and Shawn "Napster"'
Fanning now knows that music is not like software. Or so the music industry
lawyers have told him.

Perhaps, however, Don's book will cause these people to stop and think. Perhaps
people will be brave enough to entertain new methods of generating revenue from
artistic endeavors. Perhaps with the more immediate "suddenness"' of the Internet
market, patents and copyrights should have a shorter lifetime, to allow the
original artist to make some money, yet allow others to transform an artist's
works later on. Or perhaps as John Perry Barlow, a lyricist for my own favorite
band "The Grateful Dead," explains that artists should make the bulk of their
money out of public displays of their art (i.e., concerts). Perhaps an artist
should give away his creation, but sell his performance. This might be extended
to streaming video concerts. Then concepts like Napster would help the music
market, not hurt it.

I am a great fan of the Star Trek series of TV shows. In those shows people
worked because they enjoyed doing their jobs, not because they were paid. It
may take several decades for us to get to that stage, but perhaps the ideals
of the Open Source community can help get us started, to "`boldly go where no
man has gone before."' But we have to take that first step.

I hope that Don's book lights the fire of ideas for you, no matter what your
endeavor might be.

Warmest wishes,

Jon ``maddog'' Hall

Preface

Do you need this book?
You probably do if you are curious about Linux and Open Source. Nowadays you
can open your newspaper or newsmagazine or turn on your television or radio,
and find a lot of small news stories about both. You will have a harder time,
however, finding a source that covers the whole Open Source world from top to
bottom. You can buy Eric Raymond’s book on theoretical writings about Open Source,
The Cathedral and the Bazaar; Bob Young’s story of how he got Red Hat,
Inc., up and running, Under the Radar; or the perspectives of Open Source
leaders in Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution. They
each contribute their part of the picture.

If you want to know more, there are a couple of magazines that cover Linux.
To become well informed, you must spend a lot of time on the Internet (where
Open Source lives) and visit an Open Source or Linux conference or trade show
or two. And you will have to try to pull it all together. That’s where this
book comes in. It is intended for a variety of readers — you may be one of them
— to pull all the information together.

Who This Book is For

This book is for general readers and computer users who wish the entire subjects
of Open Source and Linux would sit still in one place long enough for them to
get a look at it (and they do in this book). These general readers are unsatisfied
by media accounts and don’t know where to look for detailed information on the
Internet. (There’s a large collection of Web links at the end of this book,
besides links scattered through the text.) This book is also for corporate IT
managers who want to know more about how Open Source will fit in with corporate
computing strategies. And, finally, it is for those members of the Open Source
community who would like a chance to look back at where they came from and see
their movement in a larger context.

If a chapter (or group of chapters) doesn’t interest you at first, go ahead
and skip it for now. There’s a glossary in the back. Turn to it if you don’t
see terms explained on the spot. Although the more specialized chapters are
written in more specialized language, this is not a technical book; it is written
primarily from a business point of view. The book spends little time on software
development tools because technical people generally have their own ways of
learning about new tools.

A Guide to the New Land

If the past looks like a foreign country, certainly the future is even more
strange to us; if Open Source is that future, then it will seem even stranger
to the ordinary computer users, most of whom are deeply immersed in the Windows
world. You may understand about Linux that it is an operating system, that it
is free, and that some people are making fabulous amounts of money from it,
but the details are unclear, and it all seems to have something to do with dot-com
IPO hype. As for Open Source, you may have heard that it’s good, but there is
a strange haze hanging over it. It seems to be associated with a closed community
of arrogant juvenile geniuses with overly-dramatic or difficult personalities,
with demonstrations outside Microsoft offices demanding refunds…and what does
that penguin have to do with it, anyway? And will it really destroy Microsoft?

This book takes up these questions and stereotypes. For now let me assure you
that the Open Source community is very interested in offering ordinary users
a superior computing experience; how they hope to do this forms part of the
book. There are plenty of young people in the movement, and they do attract
attention. The community also includes many experienced coders and managers
with gray hair who are trusted members of the corporate world.

How I Came to Write This Book

My own work is software marketing and licensing. In the mid-1990s I began hearing
a low buzz around the Research Triangle area of North Carolina about a little
Linux company called Red Hat. I had tried a couple of times to find them, but
no one seemed to know where they were (access was through the Internet, and
the company was still run out of an apartment in those days). I found them in
1996 when someone gave me the name of Michael K. Johnson, who was one of a dozen
Red Hat employees now settled in their new offices. Like so many in the Open
Source community (which did not even have that name in those days) he was very
helpful and free with information. He had just given up editorship of the Linux
Journal, and gave me 18 back issues to help me get started in understanding
what was going on.

I had been aware of Richard Stallman and his Free Software Foundation since
his early days in the 1980s; he appeared to be in the same category as the man
who runs Project Gutenberg, whose goal is to put as much public domain literature
on the Internet as possible. There seemed to be no commercial application for
either. Red Hat, on the other hand, had a business plan and an aggressive marketer,
Bob Young. Bob was quite open and voluble in explaining his branding strategy
for Red Hat

Note

During one visit in early 1998 Bob Young sketched
the diagram that I titled Unified Field Theory of Licensing? and used
in talks and in Chapter 7. At the time he told me I was free to use
it, but without his name. Since Bob subsequently put it in his own book,
I thought I would explain its appearance here, and the fact that I have
been free with it for a couple of years now.

As I began to meet more Linux people (via e-mail), it was inevitable that I
should run into Jon "maddog" Hall, executive director of Linux International.
Through his efforts, I was invited to give a talk at the Freenix section of
Usenix in January 1997. The talk covered the methods of distribution in the
commercial software world; it was by now apparent that Linux was headed there
(nobody dreamed how soon), and we wanted Linux developers to start thinking
about commercializing their software and how it could be done.

From that time on I gave more talks to Open Source developer groups, and as
I learned more and accumulated more material, it occurred to me that there was
no book explaining the Open Source world to those outside it, or to those who
had only a partial view of it from inside. A book is always a larger undertaking
than one thinks at first, and I owe apologies to the publisher and to my family
for having spent so much time on it. Part of the difficulty was the speed at
which things change in the Open Source world; the trick is to keep current while
putting in the book the long-term truths about Open Source. Only its readers
can tell me whether I have succeeded.

This Book's Organization

The book is divided into six sections, the first looking back into the past,
and the last looking ahead into the future. Within the running text there are
sidebars that take up related topics in more detail and notes that supplement
or update the material. There are also two appendixes and a short glossary.

Part I: Open Source Software is Linux…and More

This part delves into the origins of Open Source software and what has already
been done to commercialize it. Open Source is not so much a revolutionary idea
as an earlier way of doing things that is being vindicated as everyone moves
deeper into the computer world.

Part II: Open Source Software in Your Business

This part explores the idea of adopting Open Source software in your business,
and the advantages and problems of such a move. This part includes a quick survey
of available software that any office would expect to use and a comparison of
Windows and Linux.

Part III: Open Source Licensing: Does It Have to Be This
Hard?

This part gets to the heart of what is unique about Open Source software. The
licensing can be complicated, but problems are simplified if you know what you
want to accomplish and pick the license accordingly. In this part, you also
learn to look the legendary UNIX bug-a-boo, fear of forking, in the eye.

Part IV: Linux is Moving UP…and DOWN

This part deals with the flexibility of Linux. It describes how Linux now runs
on mainframe computers, runs gangs of PC’s that behave like supercomputers,
and runs the software in new cell phones, Internet access devices, and industrial
equipment.

Part V: Open Source Software AS Your Business

This part looks at the ways companies are making money in the growing Open
Source market. You may find your own opportunity in this part.

Part VI: The Future of Open Source

This part looks at companies and community projects that are moving Open Source
forward, and how Open Source is becoming a factor in the competition between
companies such as IBM, Sun Microsystems, and Microsoft. You also learn of the
plans the large entertainment and intellectual property companies have for your
future use of books, movies, music, and software, and how Open Source software
and attitudes are in the middle of controversies that can be settled only by
Congress or the Supreme Court.

Appendixes

Appendix A contains the complete text of the following public software licenses:
GNU General Public License, GNU Lesser General Public License, QT Free Edition
License, Apache License, Mozilla Public License, IBM Public License, and BitKeeper.
Appendix B lists many Web resources that provide a wealth of information.

Acknowledgments

A great many people have been helpful to me during the writing of this book:

The preceding list includes many individuals who gave instant response to pestering
questions. I hope no one will hold these people responsible for my own shortcomings
in this book, and that the many others who have been helpful to me will not
feel slighted at not appearing here.